Strong As Stone
by Seven Ravens
Summary: The life and times of one Rei Faun Kento- a man who has held the world on the edge of insanity, death & damnation.
1. Awake

Author's Notes: First comes the general disclaimer that I do not own any rights to the Ronin Warriors universe. The family is also part of the original storyline and are not mine. I claim rights to the mother and grandfather's names only, as they are anonymous canon characters according to the internetz. All others mentioned hereafter including extended family, friends, and background characters are mine. Why you'd want to steal one, I don't know. Next, a bit of an explanation. The storyline jumps around quite a bit.

... Three periods hanging out by themselves denote a scene change

_while italics insinuate a flashback. _

_(((Anything within three parentheses suggests a flashback within a flashback. A bit confusing, but I trust that you're capable of following. I hope.)))_

That being said, I am a western writer attempting to write about two very foreign cultures, so please excuse me if anything is inaccurate. Also, it's been quite a while since I've written something of this magnitude and my grammar skills may be a bit rusty. Constructive criticism and reviews are welcomed.

**Chapter One: Awake**

The tall grass hissed over leg plating, all noise and no feeling in his head. Below, the earth muted his footsteps in the field. He didn't know how long he had been walking and the memory of where he came from slipped out of his grasp just a moment too soon. Wherever it was, it sent waves of sinister energy at his back and drove his heels.

A village was coming up, small and silent, with only a few blocks of modern buildings to serve as the downtown area, casting cool blue shadows over the concrete. He hadn't been feeling out for any nether realm presences but the lack of life caused him to instinctively tense and prepare for ambush as he eased toward the field's edge.

The soil disappeared from under him so suddenly he wasn't even aware until the soft clicks of his spurs echoed off the cobblestone. With nerves electrified by the dead giveaway of his march, the lone man crept on through the still streets until he came upon someone frozen at a wrought-iron table in front of the café. It was a little old woman, her hair gone white, with her back turned to him. He stopped for a moment, trying to discern whether or not she was a threat. In the passing heartbeat his fears turned to the possibility that she was wounded and his feet crushed the road into gravel as he ran to her, glancing around at some unknown threat concealed in the alleys. Nothing there but footfall resounding.

The woman was fine as far as he could tell. Then again, she could very well slip out of her skin and be some nasty thing going straight for his throat. Unchanged even as he neared, she afforded him one glint of a face bone white and too much like sand whipped into curved trenches. She jerked into life when he reached her, as though she was a doll with cranks of an invisible key that sent her little arm moving slowly in jagged little shakes against the liquid weight in her hand. She sipped her tea, leaving a red lip print on the ring of the cup, and despite her frail body she spoke in a low, cracked voice. "They don't want you here, boy. They fear the darkness that follows you."

The Ronin looked to the windows to see them for the first time: faces vanishing from the sky reflected in glass, shying away from his sight and a viscous mist clinging to brick. Behind him a heavy black fog was creeping across the field from which he came. He spun around to the woman with hands up in protest. "No, that's what I'm up against!"

To the empty windows, "I'm not here to hurt you, I swear!"

The old woman turned her eyes from the tea leaves in her cup and looked at him fully for the first time. Her blue gaze pierced him and she let the moment hang before speaking. "Take your death and destruction elsewhere."

He nodded. He was no angel of destruction… was he?

A wall of cold air fell as he walked to the edge of town where the fog was growing ever closer. The tinge of green swirled about his legs and he paused there to watch the black clouds rolling in overhead. A nervous sigh escaped his lips, taking with it all the warmth and fear from his heart. Only the cold nerve and lust remained, the thrill for blood that was always new, even now. He would have to make a break into the thicket of woods and try to lead away whatever was out there.

For just a moment he felt the hollow eyes of the vague blue faces at his back.

...

Kento started awake and held his tremoring muscles as still as he could manage in the initial deafening silence that came with resurfacing from dreams. When the vision began to dissolve into the walls of the dark apartment, he relaxed and kicked off the hot sheets to expose his sweat-soaked shirt and boxers.

The air in his bedroom was still in the lull of night. Signs of the sun lightened the sky outside his window into grays and pinks while the man watched shifting, silent gazes raining down their revulsion here in the waking life. The stares forced his body into an upright position on the edge of his bed to rest his head in his hands. Gravity settled his blood, leaving his muscles heavy and acidic with exhaustion as though he'd been thrashing about all night. He closed his burning eyes and saw them still, visages gone black with a sea of void white eyes doubling the glassy blue masks of his dream. They didn't disappear, no matter how hard he rubbed his eyes. They merely changed colors.

The dreams still haunted him. They'd begun in the early days of the first war when he'd flown off a derailed train and down a rabbit hole, where he saw the blankets of sand and blood sculpted from Hardrock's insatiable thirst for battle. In his life of training and glory dreams, he'd never steeled himself for that.

The faces of his mother and grandfather appeared among the dream masks, twisted and agonized as the night Hardrock shook awake.

_Winter had lingered that year. The season did not bother Kento much, even the ever-present dirty slush that washed the world in flat shades of gray and brown. He simply didn't like the dormancy. That was all gone now, far past this evening in the late spring months, the time he preferred. The ground was waking and growing in long breaths of green up the hillsides, reaching to the edges of a sky promising rain. Subtle breezes drew the warmth from the evening soil as the sun slipped through the clouds to paint the shadowed roofs and broad rivers of road in licks of orange._

_It was one of the first balmy nights of the year, with crickets and wind whispering little songs over the silken red wallpaper. The earth shivered under the house, up into the beams. Kento shifted his weight on the living room floor where he had stretched out after dinner. Throughout his life unease settled over him prior to every shimmy and shake, and now was no exception. His first concrete memories consisted of his nerves betraying him in cold waves working up from his feet to gnaw harshly at the pit of his stomach, sometimes igniting into an electric burn rattling through the meat of his bones in those rare but time-stopping quakes that sent him huddling into doorways with arms clutching protectively at his family. He had learned to ignore it and yet, tonight, tension flowed through the ground, through the air, through _him_. He merely turned again and tried to focus on the newest episode of Takeshi's Castle. From above his head came a delicate however strong woman's voice. Kento glanced up at his mother chattering into the telephone and nudged the TV's volume button with his toe._

_Rei Faun Wenling, formerly of the Sikou name, was tall and pretty with a youthful white face and the same slate blue hair and eyes as her son. All his life she wore the matriarchal bun and the elegant yet durable clothes needed for a traditional mother and lady of her husband's business. Once she had been slim, in times before Kento could remember. Having borne five children, her hips had settled out nicely into a solidly curved body. Small lines were beginning to form on either side of a mouth that too often twisted itself into silent shows of emotion, be it good or bad._

_As a quiet yet candid soul, it was not often that he saw her draw out conversations as she was doing now with his aunt. Very much the foundation for the earth-bound clan, she instead chose to direct her energy into stones placed all about her home and garden. Like her son, she was eroded by concern. She took on the sorrows and illnesses and pains from her family with a loving duty, and the negative energy unhealed by stone showed through in her tendency to absentmindedly rub her shoulders within the privacy of the home. When needed, she tended her stressed body with the finest root blends and muds. Tonight was such a night when she painted her face with the stuff and folded her bare feet up under herself in her spot on the loveseat. The scent of clay mask, powdery and slightly feminine, mixed with the warm air of evening into what would become one of Kento's most cherished and painful memories. He would not know how much he would miss it. Not yet._

_In fact, that subtle odor wasn't even registering in his conscious mind. He was musing to himself that he could tiptoe through the course in which normal Japanese citizens were failing. A man lost his footing and tumbled into a mud pit. The television host uttered a quick offer of sympathies before he gestured wildly at a green screen flashing replays and a current tally. Kento groaned and rolled over as it cut away to commercial, not particularly interested in the graphics of Lucky Cat brand salmon._

_Darkness filled the doorway in a form smaller than he, but threatening all the same. The boy instinctively rolled into a crouch with one knee to the ground and hands splayed defensively._

_The figure moved slowly, deliberately into the light, revealing itself to be a worn man. His bones held strong under the yellow skin that had worn into deep grooves with the blood and labor in his lifetime, etching a scowl that dripped from the corners of eyes and mouth. A shock of that same blue held fast to the white knot stretched tight over his forehead._

_He was Sikou Qiang, Kento's maternal grandfather and only living grandparent. He shouldered his duty as carrier of the Hardrock bloodline with a subdued pride, having taken care to perfect the wushu to mastery as a young man and pass it along to his kin. He marched on through time gracefully with the edges of his mind still sharp against the years._

_The earthen armor itself had been lost from the physical plane; all that remained was an antique scroll with ten warriors charging five on five over charred battlefield. Taking after his ancestors, Qiang whispered the tale of five juxtaposed warriors many times into the night for his grandchildren. Kento had imagined himself in samurai garb, fighting in the name of balance beside the other four, all anonymous behind the armor masks. These memories, too, so innocent and half-forgotten, would resurface in the depths of tunnels and atop broken concrete where he would lay his head. They kept him moving when pain radiated from every bone and every muscle cried out for peace._

_Now he was just riding the crest of unused adrenaline. In the space between recognition and relaxation, the boy caught the flicker of orange over the flat blue in the Hardrock patriarch's eyes. Though old man's voice was thick with age, it held its strength. "Kento."_

_The way his grandson's name fell from his lips brought the air to a standstill. His daughter's voice fell into silence before it hit the telephone. Suddenly the drone on television was distant. Qiang lifted his chin, guiding the mother and son to the pair of iron oxen on the end table and between the hooves, where a smooth, clear crystal emanated an orange light that painted the walls in dim arcs._

"_No…" Wenling was the first to break the silence with one pained word. Flakes of dried mask cracked and fell away at the edges of her face. "No… Not yet! He's only fourteen!"_

_Kento pushed himself up onto his feet, through her cries, toward the crux of his existence that had, until this nightfall, lain dormant. For a moment the rest of the world crumbled away as his hands closed in on the rumbling crystal and he stood there, feeling the call of battle, the dreams of victory flowing all through him from the one link between this world and something greater. That tension was stronger than ever then, fixing his fingertips to the orb just like a magnet. His eyes burned with the horizontal slashes of a single character. Justice._

_When his senses came back to him, only his grandfather stood in awe of the armor's orb. The telephone lay squawking effeminately on the floor. The two shook themselves back into reality and the elder bent to sweep up the receiver._

"_Grandfather, where is Mom?"_

"_She's gone to tell your father." Qiang did not sound as joyous as he should have. Kento knew his mother must be taking it with a great weight on her heart._

_The boy stared into the rounded stone and found no direction in its light. "What next?"_

"_I cannot tell you, Grandson, for I do not know. Hardrock belongs to you and you alone. My only guidance is the words of those before me: the path is sought within. You must find the way with your feet and your heart."_

_Kento turned to his grandfather, waiting for something more. To the puzzled look Qiang replied, "Go, prepare for bed"_

_He opened his mouth, found nothing else he could ask of Qiang as the old man pressed the telephone into his ear. "Yes, Chu Ju? Are you there?… Wenling is fine. Just shocked… The day is here."_

_He rolled the door on its track and found himself in the verandah. After the Rei Faun family had emigrated from the old country, Kento's grandfather Gen Tung, long deceased, worked steadily to purchase a siheyuan house, modeled in the style of old Beijing by an immigrant Chinese architect and braced against the temperamental Japanese land with buttresses and crossbeams._

_The corner house was a large figure-eight composed of seven stone buildings with a large painted rose quartz marking the address in the outlying streets of Yokohama. A yellow dragon clawed its way across a crimson gate that swung back from the street into an open-air entrance hall in the southeast corner adorned with an iron patterned screen to keep the ill spirits out. The southern building served as a dining room adjoined with the kitchen in part of the lower west building. The next room to the north was the bedroom of the second-eldest son, Mei Ryu. Across the courtyard, the lower east building constituted his youngest brother's room and nearer his parents' room was the master bath. The main building was divided with a small walkway linking the two courts. The room to the east was the bedroom of his parents, the room to the west was the family area. The interior was decorated with traditional scarlet and oxblood taking the form of figurines, tapestries, paintings. The family found the auspicious red to be a harsh color and kept it as accents against the earth tones within their home. The remaining décor was mostly swaths of lush houseplants springing from ornate pottery in crowds underneath the windowsills and from hooks and braids in the ceiling. In both rooms, the southern windows were larger than those facing north to gaze into the courtyard._

_Outside, a stone-topped table sat in the southwest corner for the family to dine there whenever the idea seized them. Nestled into the diagonal corner was the Buddha's shrine. Ash and soil bedded the etched tablets that immortalized the family's sacred dead on either side of the weathered icon. The yard was broken with flowers and paths, lit with candles along the roofed walkways and lanterns hanging from the tallow tree in the middle of it all._

_The upper east building roofed his grandfather's living space, the meditation room, and his father's library. The smaller room in the southern half of the upper west building was his mother's sun room, decked with edible greenery among the birdcage and iguana tank for the pets to have at. The larger was the weaponry room, a space barren save for the implements of pain, old and new, decorative and functional. Between the two rooms a heavy wooden side gate that served as the door to the garage that lay outside the house proper._

_A few peony bushes hugged the walls of the northernmost building and nothing more, for the rear courtyard served as the family's training grounds and even the grass had been beat back into nothing. The building was the only one in the house with two floors with an anteroom that separated the two lower rooms between his sisters, where maidens were customarily housed. A stairway wound around a large ficus growing right out of the floor and led up to a small bathroom in the southeast corner of the building, and his bedroom running along the entire upper floor. It overlooked his home through high, narrow windows and allowed for one glance back at the garage. A large window faced the west and a smaller one to the east opened up into the branches of a tree splitting the small lot between house and alley. Near the alleyway was an old compost bin. On humid days the smell permeated the air and Kento took in the scent as part of what was his._

_The Rei Faun heir looked around at the lit sheets of glass. Most of the family was still awake on this electric eve, their silhouettes moving and shrinking and growing all around the courtyard. He set foot past his parent's room and stole a glance at the picture cast in shadow on the vermillion curtains: his father sitting with head low between his shoulders and his mother holding his baby sister, turned to look at her husband. The moment was too intimate and, turning away, he hurried on down the hall._

_Water surged into the granite tub, sending an ever-growing cloud of steam into the bathroom while Kento stripped down and hung a towel from the corner of the gilt dragon screen. After he stepped into the tub and his nerves had acclimated to the heat, he tried to conjure all the glorious fantasies that had crowned his head for so long. Only an absence of all emotion flowed through him in the wake of shock, and that damned magnet pulling at his stomach. The confidence that had building all these years, all the training, all of grandfather Qiang's stories, all the daydreams, all whirled around too fast for his own head to keep up with. Instead the weight of his body sank into the heat._

_The only thing that made sense in his head was the barrage of questions. He rose and began to wash as he tried to answer himself. What would he do now? Carry on until something goes down. The best thing would be to keep ears and eyes open for any signs. Signs like what? He didn't know, really. What if nothing happened? Then he would have to go looking. Would something come hunting for him? They couldn't, not yet. They didn't know who possessed the armor…did they? Worst of all, how long must he wait for an answer?_

_When the water had drawn out the last of what energy was his, Kento pulled the drain plug and rose from the bath. The whole affair had done nothing to relax and prepare him for rest; the magnetic charge still flowed. He pulled on a pair of jeans over wet skin and walked barefoot to feel out the fridge in the darkness, where he stood inside the open door, basking in the soft yellow light and picking apart the last of a butterflied hen. The fan was kicking on just as he finished his midnight snack, throwing a hum up from the floor. He dropped the bones into the trash, closed the door, and pulled his weight up onto the marble counter, then merely sat looking at the orange glow of the metropolis outside the walls of his home._

_The magnet was kind then, ebbing in the night as if satiated with the food. His eyes burned and his body ached, yet he fought the pull of sleep. He feared what lay on the other side. After a little while a voice came from the darkness behind him, rumbling low like the ghost of an earthquake. "Strange night, huh kid?"_

_The boy's heart nearly exploded. "Don't do that! Are you trying to kill us all?" He wheezed with a palm held dramatically to his chest. When his nerves had calmed enough and his father did not laugh at the morbid remark, he turned around to the sight of ash glowing red and lighting the same jaw as his own. _

"_Dad, are you smoking?"_

"_Leave your old man alone," the rough voice, a little heavier tonight, said from behind the cherry and took another drag. "This is very stressful."_

"_Yeah, tell me about it," he turned back to the city lights with his hands pushing his shoulders up against the counter._

_Kento had inherited his father's image from face to frame. Rei Faun Chan Run towered over his son now and would until the boy leveled off at 186 centimeters when he was 19 years old. He passed on the coarse hair, though his was cropped and slicked and the color of amethyst. His eyes, smaller and moss green, wrinkled when he laughed. He possessed the brutal strength that showed in his son. The two shared the square chin and barrel chest, the gravelly voice and joie de vivre._

_As his family reaped gifts of the physical in bounty through their restaurant, he had learned the joy of the perpetual work to fill his days before coming home at night to bask in the comfort of family and domain, and it showed in his callused olive skin. His great palms were always busy, flitting with paperwork, heavy with a hammer, pointed to count inventory, swinging through fire in his kitchens, pulling his weight up hills when he led the family into the countryside for hikes, tracing the sky to teach his children how to tell time by sun and stars. _

_An earthen man through and through, Chan Run was still affected by his birth into a cycle of flame and harbored a deep affinity for pyrotechnics. All holidays were celebrated with the small vibrant display in the rear courtyard. For the fireworks he could not legally handle, he was the one hustling the family out the door for the Chinatown display. And he would hold his ribs and laugh maniacally under the rain of mineral fire, always._

_Perhaps the fire could explain his love for tobacco. The cigarette was unfamiliar for Kento to see between his father's teeth, had been since the time near his eighth birthday. The process of abandoning the drug was the only time he had seen Chan Run snap at the family and argue with his mother. The old coffin nail was not a welcome sight._

"_Where did you get that, anyway?"_

"_The stale pack I've been hoarding for times like this." The answer was very matter-of-fact. The tension in his father's body was almost audible then. He waited. "Have I told you how you were given your name?"_

"_Aw, Papa. Please," he held up his hands in the dark. "Grandfather told me this a few years ago on my birthday. Don't you remember?"_

"_I remember perfectly well. You simply didn't hear it all. Listen to your tale, Kento, and keep it in your heart when you go off to battle."_

_The bearer of Hardrock looked over to watch the ash burn bright in the darkness. When Rei Faun Chan Run began, a veil of smoke rolled across his son's vision of the orange clouds over Yokohama outside the kitchen window._

"_Your grandmother had always dreamed of having a large family, and so did your mother. Dawei used to tell me of how they both wanted brothers and sisters for your mother. But her body was frail; she had difficulties even with your little aunt Chu Ju. Her body was far too weak for your uncle, and she knew."_

_Here the two paused for the lost souls._

"_Your mother was crushed. I had come to know your grandmother Dawei and loved her. One could always find a friend in her. She was a good woman, kind and even-tempered. I never knew why the heavens took and took from her in the way they did._

"_She was so happy when she learned of the son she was to have, but anyone could see a fear in her eyes. It was like she held something from us. She was also very pale, and grew whiter with time. When she passed, your mother was heartsick. I saw her little aside from the funeral affairs and the classes she managed to attend. In the few moments we had together, she simply laid her head in my lap and cried. The pain she was in must have been unbearable."_

_Chan Run lapsed again to reflect on Wenling's pain and perhaps his own. Kento could feel it in the darkness, in a nearly imperceptible shift of corporeal magnetism._

"_We had wanted to begin planning our wedding after our schooling, but that was lost. I was so worried for her strength!" A pause, another chemical breath to look back on an agonized face. A face Kento had seen shadows of just tonight, a face Kento did not like._

"_After our graduation, she insisted that we postpone the date. I didn't argue, of course. She was so tired she just slept. For months and months, she would wander like a zombie whenever she crawled from her bed. All I could do was tend to her and wait. When she woke up again, she was better. Silent and pained, but determined to rebuild herself stone by stone. I waited a long time to make her my wife. Until then I was there for her every time she needed me. Even when she didn't._

"_And when the heavens blessed us with you," he turned to his eldest, "you were a healthy baby. You ate so much and still managed to sap your mother's strength. I was afraid that the same thing would happen, that I'd lose both of you._

"_But your mother never showed any fear, not once. After she fought and fought, I remember, she really did glow, looking down at you like that." He paused to take a drag. "She knew. I think she knew before you were even born. If she didn't, she figured it out soon enough, the way you would cry before an earthquake."_

_Kento shut his eyes with the old pain running through him._

"_She's shaken right now, but don't fear for her, Kento. She's always known. We've _all_ known."_

_(((This is what the boy had heard on his tenth birthday, when his grandfather went to Chinatown and came back with, among lotus seed and eggs for the dinner, a bottle of wheat wine._

_Before the meal Kento and the other children were herded into the rear courtyard, where Qiang and mother and father and aunt Chu Ju presented him with a coiling dragon staff and a naginata, the weapons of the armor Hardrock. He was finally of the proper age for training._

_Leaves were beginning to rain down in noisy showers of orange as the moon edged back into the earth's last shadow before the Harvest Festival. Kento picked a leaf out of his birthday cake and twirled it between his fingers while Qiang leaned into the sour cloud hanging over the table to speak of his pale wife, and then of his pale daughter. The old man never said why he chose to drink that particular night, if not perhaps to regale Kento with the tale in colors and strikes and blows so vivid while the boy looked upon the staves and ponder Hardrock marching on through the mountains like the Ronin of days before, on toward a demon left faceless and nameless by the keeper of the tale. The ground cried out and opened to swallow up the twisting, howling creature at his will._

_The story, however, started off on a somber note. Then again, many stories did.)))_

_Chan Run's gaze focused into the present and turned for his son to see in the dimness. "I know you won't fail, son. You've spent nearly half your life preparing for this. The only thing I've given you is the body and the roof over your head. Your mother has given everything for you to win. Her strength of mind, her wisdom, her fight, her temper. If nothing else, come back for her."_

"_I will if you put that thing out," Kento flicked a finger at the half-burned cherry. Without question, the senior Rei Faun plucked the butt from his mouth with thumb and middle finger to stamp it out in the drain and swing the faucet over from the left basin to give a shot of water on the hot ash. It went without saying that he wouldn't do this again. "You'd better bury that in the trash or else Mom will have your skin. You should probably brush your teeth again, too."_

_Chan Run shrugged and ran it down the drain. "I need sleep and so do you. We'll figure out what to do in the morning."_

_His throat rose and fell in a nervous swallow and Kento knew the lie. "Go to great-uncle Jianyu's. You know it's unsafe so close to the cities."_

"_There is no honor in fleeing without your first son-"_

"_But it's not worth it to lose everyone else. Especially when none of us actually knows what will really happen. I've heard all of you talk about it when you thought I was sleeping. You have to get as far into the country as you can. Run for the hills!" He threw his hands up for comic relief. His father chuckled, an affirmation of the plans._

"_In the morning. It's time to sleep."_

"_I'll try." The magnet was gone now and the idea was suddenly quite possible. "Goodnight."_

"_Goodnight," Chan Run echoed as he started toward his bedroom door._

_Kento went down to check the front gate's lock. He rounded the partition and stood looking around at the front houses, darker than before. His father was just turning off the overhead light in his bedroom, leaving only the table lamp's glow. From the cracks of the bathroom door, light filtered out with the sound of running water in the sink. He caught a glance up at the clear sky before knocking on the door. Wenling rolled back the door almost immediately with water still running down her face. She dried her skin in the hand towel and waited for him to speak._

"_I'm gonna hit the hay," he tilted his head at his bedroom. "Goodnight."_

_Wenling said nothing for a moment, only bowed her head. Then she sprang up on her toes to wrap her arms around his shoulders. "Goodnight."_

_He gave her a reassuring smile as he broke the embrace and jumped the space between the angle of the verandahs, over Buddha's head. His grandfather's room was lit with a reading lamp. For a moment Kento thought of stopping to say goodnight, but the old man was never to be disturbed after he retiring to his room. So he kept on, straight across the body-worn mat of dirt that shone in the moonlight, beckoning to him._

_(((A pebble flecked off the ridge of his left eyebrow._

"_Pick up your staff, Kento." Wenling stepped forward and threw another rock at his shoulder. When he hesitated, expecting maternal instinct to hold her fingers, she did not miss a beat. An edge of quartz bit at his cheek. "The enemy will not pause for you."_

"_Ow! Mom-"_

_Another rock._

"_You must listen to that gut feeling."_

_Another bite._

"_And act before they can."_

_A glint nearly cut at his eye and the pain sent his body into a defensive charge with a spin of wrists and fingers.)))_

_Up the stairs and into his unlit room, scarcely noteworthy save for the sand yellow walls and slightly Westernized atmosphere of mecha figures and action posters. He moved through the shadows of branches toward the far west end where his bed lay, through the space left empty for the long nights and rainy days when he would practice his forms and certain routines with his weapons. He stripped off his jeans and stepped into a pair of sleeping shorts, musing to himself that he was still too worked up with the news, that he wouldn't be able to sleep like this._

_He had barely finished the notion when gravity pulled him down onto the sheets, into the last spell of absolute peace he would have for a long time._


	2. Bones of the Earth

Author's Notes: Thank you kindly for the feedback. Today's notes… I am following the original chronology. Thus it was 1988 when the Ronins were off saving the world, the days before there were cell phones and computers everywhere. Also, these first few chapters are in memory form, so italics everywhere!

**Chapter Two: Bones of the Earth**

_The smell of bread wafted into his face the moment he opened the door at the foot of the stairs and only grew stronger as he neared the kitchen. Inside his mother was glancing watchfully at the last of the food cooking on the stove as she set out plates. Licks and pocks of burn scarring along her arms shone in the morning light, proud flesh that marked her as one of the Rei Faun clan._

_Chan Run was present yet invisible behind a wall of neatly printed Chinese characters. As a boy he had been tutored to read his native tongue, something that, unfortunately, he did not think to pass on to his eldest in the midst of all his training. So here Kento stood, unable to read most of what stood between them. "Good morning, Papa."_

_A corner of the paper flicked down long enough for a toothy smile to erupt between the finely groomed mutton chops gracing the angles of his father's jaw. "Good morning."_

"_Anything happening in the world today?"_

"_Don't ask."_

"_Good morning, Mom," he put a hand on Wenling's shoulder and pressed his cheek against her hair. Her eyes fell. Kento didn't try to cheer her, knowing it was futile this day, and turned to his baby sister banging her fists on the high chair tray for his attention. "Good morning, Chun Fa."_

_(("Kento, are you still awake?" his father's voice rolled to him through the tether between sleep and wakefulness, where he had fought to grasp into the midnight hour. The boy bolted upright on the couch with his hands dutifully on his knees._

"_Yeah, I'm up."_

"_Everyone else is asleep." Kento glanced around at his siblings scattered about the living room in various states of repose. Chan Run chuckled and held a hand out for his son to pull himself up. "Congratulations, kid. You win the prize! Let's go!"_

_The others stirred not, even as grandfather Qiang came wandering in on heel and stick, smiling and humming an old song within the throat bellow that etched face which had worn itself into a smile tonight._

_A mist lie over the court in a luminescent blanket as he slipped through the darkened corridors into the muted bedroom, waiting to see his newborn sister. The midwife, Natsumi, moved softly to gather up the bundled infant from her bassinet. "Careful, she's heavier than your other sister and brothers were."_

"_Nearly as heavy as Kento," Wenling's voice was laced with exhaustion after her fifth and decidedly final child._

_From the moment she was born on that misty spring night, Chun Fa was the only other Rei Faun child to share Chan Run's thick build and Wenling's blue coloring. She would grow to possess the appetite, the same loud, awkward mannerisms and love of wushu like Kento. With the wide eyes inherent in all the brothers and sisters, the newborn took in her big brother that first night with a quiet fascination that she would ever share with another soul._

_As he stood here now cooing down into the blanket, the baby squealed and flopped her arms about. "Check it out! She recognizes my voice!")))_

"_Good morning, big brother," Chun Fa greeted him slowly, careful with her new words._

"_What are we having this morning?"_

_The girl looked at the food being dished up on the counter. "Rice porridge… and century eggs… and dumplings… and vegetable buns."_

_Kento pretended to inspect the food. "Yeah… you're right! You're so smart!"_

_The three year-old gleamed. Her pride paled with hunger when Chan Run tore off a bit of the stale rice ball from the previous night's dinner and presented it before her. She shoved the food into her mouth with a squeal, little grains peeling and falling from her face. Apparently pleased with the girl's appetite, her father followed suit._

_Another set of footsteps was tracing toward the room. In stepped Mei Ryu, six years old and fourth in the line of siblings. The boy had the angular face and solid body typical of his paternal family, though not as wide as the eldest and youngest children. His hair was purple like his father with skin white and eyes blue like his mother. The first trait everyone outside these walls happened to notice, however, was the slight distortion of legs._

"_Mei Ryu, get a glass-" Wenling began. The answering voice was raspy in its youth._

"_I know, I know! You only tell me this every day," he snapped, already getting a cup for his soya milk. _

"_Don't interrupt your mother, boy!" The inflection of the last word from Chan Run's mouth and the flash of green glare was enough to bring his knees knocking together into an apologetic bow for Wenling._

_An exception to the generally healthy earth clan, Mei Ryu suffered rickets and would not overcome the disease for another two years. His mother had been carrying him when her eldest learned of his duty as bearer of the earth armor, and blamed her sorrow on the rare sickness. Thus she over-mothered him and his reactive lashes, coupled with an unspoken envy of his family's healthy bones, had rooted themselves into an irritable personality. Unable to spar with the others, he contented himself with practicing his exercises, no matter it may have pained him. The rest of the time he favored soaking up the sunshine with prescription shoes rebelliously abandoned in the garden in favor of bare feet against the earth, drinking epidemium tea and tracing his fingers in the dust._

_While he grimaced at the watery beverage sloshing out of the carton, the kitchen door slid back on its track. A girl, tall for eleven years, was locked with that amethyst inherent in Chan Run and Mei Ryu. Her round face mirrored the photographs of young Wenling: pale and serious with green eyes always calculating, always criticizing. She was a pretty girl, though she shyly concealed it behind her bookish ways as she weighed her intelligence favorably against beauty. Being the ideally obedient young woman of her culture, she had a quiet pride about her blood, choosing to don silken patterned cheongsam in place of modern fashion._

_Though she had not inherited her mother's green thumb, she was happy to water the plants and, more so, to sit in the shade of the garden with her books. Her brothers sometimes chased her screaming into the house with a centipede or a spider, where she would hole up within and pore herself over her texts. When it came down to it she could ignore the creepy-crawlies with a bit of determination, for on hikes she was always the first one racing through the fields with long, pointed legs, springing from rock to rock up the mountainside._

_Her prominent area of knowledge was the concrete nature of mathematics, particularly bookkeeping (already she was thrilled to help maintain the workings of the restaurant office) and geometry. Over the last few years she had discovered the phenomenon of fractals, and with graphing paper and colored pencils she had learned to create primitive, however impressive, recreations of the rough shapes. Any effort to explain the concept was lost on Kento, and always ended with a sigh and a lecture about studying more. Rinfi couldn't help that motherly trait; she saw it as her duty to keep the other children in line - Kento included. _

_Wenling counted only four of her children and turned to her elder daughter coming through the doorway. "Where is your brother? Call him!"_

_Rinfi, more than happy to perform the task asked of her, turned to bark out in a strong, smooth tone, "Yun! Get in here, breakfast is ready!"_

_As the others settled around the table the missing child trailed in. Yun stood apart from the others in the smaller build and plain brown hair passed on from his maternal grandmother Dawei. Also true to the Sikou clan, his face always held a grave expression on the high-set cheekbones and down-turned mouth. The only shadow of Chan Run in his physique showed through in the green of his eyes, broken behind eyeglass lenses with an occasional smudge of clay from his habit of pushing the loose frames up on the bridge of his nose._

_Like his grandfather Qiang, Yun was reserved and meticulously clean, save for clay-caked nails and the grime before his eyes. Once the boy had discovered Play-Doh, he took to working with a great enthusiasm, always carving and molding little figurines to place about the house and working his way up to soft stone, sometimes even carving bones salvaged from the restaurant kitchen. The talent was already manifesting itself into a promising career as a sculptor in the form of art shows, sold pieces, even a commission for a family friend. In his visions he lost any sense or care for fashion and, like his elder sister's taste for tradition, took to wearing jackets unbuttoned over his t-shirts. His clothing and fingernails were clean this early in the morning._

"_Hurry up and sit down," his mother directed him from her stance over Chan Run's shoulder at the head of the table. Only Qiang, who had risen early to cook for himself, was missing. When everyone had dished up their food and sat, Wenling began, "I have something important to tell you all. It's _good_ news."_

_This seemed to be an effort to convince herself more than anyone else. She pondered it and snapped to when her family's eager silence registered. "We're going on a trip to visit uncle Jianyu."_

_At this, Yun and Mei Ryu clamored in excitement. Rinfi was brimming with questions. "Why? Did something happen?"_

"_No, no. There's nothing wrong," the veneer of comfort in her voice was not enough to convince her daughter, who looked on in unease as she continued, "Your father and I have been planning this vacation for a while now. We haven't known when it would be possible, but your great-uncle called last night. His health isn't what it used to be and he didn't sound as strong as he normally is these days, so I've decided that we should visit him now before his age wears on him any more. It will be the perfect time, what with you children on break from school."_

_Hearing the lie wear thin, Chan Run finished for her, "So we'll go visit uncle Jianyu in Ueda. We'll make a camping trip up to Mount Kamuriki for a few days while we're there, yes?"_

"_Alright!" Mei Ryu high-fived Yun._

"_Kento, however…" from the corner of his eye, Wenling's head turned. He kept his gaze on the orange chunk of shrimp floating in the middle of his bowl. "Kento will be staying here."_

"_What? Why?" Rinfi was immediately suspicious. Kento swallowed a spoonful of porridge and looked to his mother._

"_These plans are very sudden and the restaurant will be in a bind with us leaving like this. He'll stay behind for a few days to help out until the staff has rearranged their schedule in our absence so that he may benefit from this experience as well. Until he joins us, he will be staying with your aunt Zhi and uncle Sakito."_

_Unfortunately for his mother and her white lie, Rinfi was too smart to believe it. Kento was to inherit the restaurant and certainly knew how it was run, yes, but he was still too young to be left in charge. She would learn the truth alongside her cousin Jiro when, months later, she brought up the story to him and together the confused children confronted their parents._

"_We're going to have to start getting ready as soon as we're done eating." Wenling told her children while attempting to slip out of the room without touching the food she had so lovingly prepared._

"_What about you, wife?" Chan Run caught her around the waist and gestured at the meal laid out before him. "Don't think you're getting away without a bite."_

_When she paused, he grabbed a vegetable bun from the basket and offered it up. A genuine smile bloomed on her lips and she took the food into the living room, where she would spend much of her morning on the telephone._

_The family ate in silence then. Kento finished first and left his plate unwashed in the sink to wander outside where he found Qiang in the garden, stretching his muscles toward the heavens with his chin upturned in the dying sunlight. He said nothing of the gathering clouds as he stepped down the weather-worn steps. "Should I get the staves, Grandfather?"_

_The old man's face soured a little, as if irritated with the thought of interrupting the moment's peace for such a thing. His head leveled with the earth and he opened his eyes. "No, Kento, not today. Rest. Feast. Reflect."_

_Clangs and clatters of dish resounded off the walls then and the boy returned to the kitchen to help the others with the dishes. They finished the kitchen quickly in their multitude, cloths wiping at marble and over wet dishes. Kento restored the pots to their proper hooks and cupboards. Wenling took a break from phone calls to switch laundry loads in the little closet near the entry room. He finished his kitchen duties and took to sorting clothes for her._

_Chan Run headed into the restaurant he seated himself in front of the television to catch the morning news. A strong earthquake had erupted in the Tōhoku region, breaking gas mains and splitting streets. A building burned before giving over to clips of wave-damaged coastal cities in Australia and a wind-torn South Korea. A western American firestorm had erupted months early for its season. Even the meteorologist was rather intrigued with the questionable green clouds forming over western Honshu._

"_Well, that confirms it," Chan Run remarked as he got up to turn off the television. "We haven't got much time."_

_Wenling was leaning against the doorway in the kitchen with the telephone cradle in one hand and the receiver pressed into her ear. After a hassle with the hospital operator, she managed to connect with Chu Ju, who was working the trauma ward that day._

"_We're going to uncle Jianyu's as soon as Chan Run gets home from work. What about you, little sister? What will you do?… Why not? Can't you fake ill? … I know it's hard to pull it off in a hospital… There is no reason to-… What about Tai and Deshi? … Can you arrange for Tai to take your car into town for you? … Just be ready. "_

_She hung up the telephone and slumped against the doorframe, looking rather ill herself. As her husband passed, she mumbled dejectedly, "She thinks there will be people left to need a hospital. Always trying to be a hero. Stupid girl." She realized her son was listening then and her eyes flickered away to her garden. She wished to be out there, stabbing and tearing at the dirt. _

_Chan Run saw this and drew her attention away by daring to reach for her hand. Eyes closed, he asked, "Is it the obsidian today?"_

_Without awaiting an answer he tenderly peeled her fingers from around the chipped and shining black stone._

_She hid a smile behind her hand. "Don't you ever get sick of being right?"_

_Chan Run narrowed his eyes smugly. His palms closed his wife's flesh and bone around the obsidian and he held her there a moment with her hand lost in his._

_And with that, he went off to town for business. While at the restaurant he was to turn everything into the hands of the other employees, particularly Zhi, his elder sister and head of the kitchen. Though she knew of the things to come and would prepare herself at his word, she was to be the only one there who would know. Kento wondered if the others knew well enough in their hearts to run when the skies threatened._

_As the day edged on, the telephone, briefly unoccupied, began to ring on its oak table. Kento glanced at the clock as he finished setting the lunch's rice to soak. Rowen's normal waking hours outside the confines of a school schedule. In the chaos amid the house, he hadn't crossed his mind. He dried his hands and jogged down the hall to take the phone from Yun, who wordlessly held the receiver up at arm's length. The archer was frantic. _

"_The orb is glowing! What do we do now?"_

_He slipped to the end of the phone's length in the open hall before grumbling into the mouthpiece, "I have no idea. Nobody really does, not even Grandfather. I think we'll know what we're supposed to do when we're supposed to do it. Just stay put til then."_

_Silence rolled back through the wire. Then, "Kento? What about my mom and dad?"_

"_I… I don't know what you can do. Your mom should be safe…" the estranged wife globetrotted in her career. The gentleman Hashiba's work took him into the heart of the city and to the countryside depending on the day. "I don't know about your dad."_

"_What about _your _family?"_

_The coil of telephone cord disappeared in Hardrock's fist as he turned around to scan the scene in the living room: Rinfi steadily moving camping supplies toward the door, Chan Run trying (with little success) to explain to Yun that there was no room for the Atari, and Qiang showing Chun Fa what he was packing away into his suitcases. "They're going to stay with my uncle out in the country. Things should be okay here, but… you never know. Something could happen. You might wanna swing by and see everyone before they take off."_

"_Right."_

_And then, in Rowen's curt way, he hung up. Kento dropped the receiver back into the cradle and went back to the kitchen to assist Wenling in preparation for the day's meals and beyond._

_The noon hour had nearly waned when there came a bang of the copper knocker before the unlocked gate came rolling open. Rowen stepped into the house with the door's breath of the streets. He stood long and lithe, built on airy bones and small muscles taut between the bands spindling from his joints. His legs were the real threat, concealing their power within plain sight below a rail-thin torso. A mop of cerulean hair spilling over his ears and forehead seemed to command attention and the occasional problem wherever he went._

_(((The two had met in second grade. Rowen was small, only six, having proved himself worthy of moving one grade ahead. As the beginning weeks of school unfolded, it became evident that the boy, being shut in an apartment to entertain himself in the absence of his workhorse parents caused him to be self-sufficient, booksmart, though somewhat socially clueless. Many classmates turned him out instantly and he simply carried on his books as if he weren't ostracized at all._

_This didn't stop him from excelling in class. His intelligence made its presence known early on in the arithmetic and science courses. Kento, whose only shining area of expertise throughout his entire school career was high school chemistry, finally decided to swallow his pride and ask for the strange young boy's help before reports cards came out and his privileges were revoked._

_Kento had recognized the wicked grin on Akio's face the first moment Rowen was brought into the class. The resident bully's eyes roved the bright blue hair and a snort formed within the twists of his nose when the boy at the front introduced himself to his new schoolmates with a thick Okinawan accent. "Where do they keep pulling you freaks in from?"_

_A grunt in the back of Kento's throat silenced him, despite the near match in weight. In kindergarten he had dared to taunt the burly Chinese boy who, at that time, was able to speak very little Japanese. Akio learned quickly enough that the foreign-blooded was not to be toyed with, just as he was about to learn with Rowen._

_After school that day, he took in a deep breath and headed out the east doors to catch up with the new kid instead of heading north and straight home. When he caught sight of the him, the boy was being confronted by Akio. From this far off, he couldn't hear his words to the mass of flesh hovering in fists over him._

"…_whatever, you blue-haired brainiac," the bully's hand ripped the small boy's books from his arms. A look of irritation bloomed on Rowen's face, but he calmly knelt to gather them. Kento saw this from across the playground and began to make his way over. The entire way he kept himself at a brisk, steady pace; he feared that if he broke into a run, his body would go beyond his control._

_When Rowen erected himself with his books, Akio shoved him down. Kento broke into a run now, preparing to maul him from behind. But what happened next made him stop in his tracks._

_Rowen left his books where they lie and got up very calmly. Akio stared him down, unsure, and was quickly knocked off his feet when the blue-haired braniac hooked a knee. He landed on his back and a series of short, strained gasps erupted from his body in a struggle to regain the air that had been knocked out of him. As soon as he could get up, he bolted past Rowen, who stood over him and watched calmly._

"_That was pretty cool, dude," were the only words Kento could find to convey his admiration for the younger's self-control. Had it happened to him, the situation would have ended with blood. "Do you take anything?"_

"_What do you mean?" the other bent again to collect his books with a tenderness like that for fallen birds._

"_I mean, are you in karate or anything?"_

"_Oh… no. I've just learned how to get them to leave me alone as quick as possible, I guess."_

"_Huh. Well, I was gonna ask you if you could help me with math. I mean, you're probably the smartest kid in class and I'm pretty dumb."_

"_I have archery later today, but if we get to it now we could probably get most of this week's reading done."_

"_Works for me."_

_And it was as simple as that.)))_

"_What the hell is going on?" he cried frantically as he started forth from the gate, leaving the door wide to the world._

"_Rowen! Quiet yourself, the little ones don't know!" Wenling growled with eyes darting at the boy's rooms._

"_Forgive my tongue, Mama Rei Faun," the future Strata dropped into a low bow on his knees before springing up and gesturing outside with her wandering over to see, "but there's something wrong with the sky! Look!"_

"_Wasn't there some sort of fable about this?" Kento's quip went unnoticed by the archer and the matriarch. Their eyes were locked over the rooftops. He followed them out and saw it, far though clear: a tinge of electric green on clouds hanging thick over the horizon. He stood with hairs bristling on his arms, and then it hit him. The color reminded him of poison._

"_I've seen the sky turn strange colors," Rowen remarked. "Blood red after killer storms, even. But I've never seen it like that."_

_After a moment Wenling turned away, remembering her duties. "Rowen, come in and shut that door. Those are still far away. It's lunchtime, anyway."_

_The family conducted themselves as they normally would when they ate. Rowen listened patiently to Mei Ryu about the trip itinerary, even feigning jealousy for the idea of camping. Qiang finished his meal first and let his face brew over the cup of tea inert between his hands. When the two teenagers had finished their food he rose swiftly from the table, a sign to follow. The patriarch wandered the footpaths silently, taking in his home through circles. Among the family he was the only one with the time to do so. Sleep mattered little to him, and so he must have worked late into the midnight hours with packing. _

_They trailed him unquestioningly, not daring to provoke his words. Qiang's jaw was stone, always had been. He was particularly slow to find the Japanese for Rowen, who, with his mercurial tongue, had picked up much of the old dialect. Still, it was not enough for him to grasp the proper words and so Qiang chose the language of those who had worn the armors. "Tonight I want the both of you to do as you please, for I no longer know where the road will take you tomorrow. How I wish I had the answers for the two of you. My lessons stop here."_

"_Yes, Teacher-Father," they bowed their heads._

"_You are going to see things. Things that may want to make you stop and wait for the end. Things you'll never believe. Whatever way the world seems to go, keep on moving with your feet pointed straight and true, and you'll come out safe on the other side. Energy is the key."_

_He sidled up to Rowen and bent his elbow out before the point of his eye. "Understand? Straight and true."_

"_I understand," the boy followed the gesture with his own hand turned thin in his gaze._

"_But that time," a drop in Qiang's tone shifted the sermon, "is not upon us just yet. Until you see whatever sign your armors give you, don't waste yourselves on it."_

"_Yes, Teacher-Father," they reiterated._

_His eyes, silvering with years, shone the Buddha's reflection and that was the end of things as the old man started for the marble tablets of the ancestors to touch his wife's name as he did each day._

"_Thank you, Teacher-Father," the archer hesitated before starting for the door. "Until we meet again."_

"_The heavens watch over you, Rowen." Rarely did he say a name. Then his mind was gone, reaching back through decades._

_At the door, he turned to Kento with a fist clenched in determination. "I've got a plan. Tomorrow before Dad goes into the university to work on his lecture plans, I'm gonna tell him the observatory called with some crazy find and hope he'll get out the door before he thinks to actually call out there."_

"_Good plan. Best of luck to ya," Hardrock's clap on the shoulder rocked the smaller of the two._

"_Yeah. Maybe I'll see you later, buddy."_

"_Totally."_

_Rowen started for his bike and he marched the gate closed after him, where he leaned his weight against a door with an ear pressed to the wood, seeking out the thrum of the house's wiring._

_Wenling had taken care to set out her plants, painted antique vases and all, in the backyard where they would receive light and water at nature's mercy. Kento could never forget the way his mother looked at her jade tree with grief when she moved it from its spot in the living room corner, where the moody plant had resided as far back as he could remember, and set it amongst the weathered terra cotta pots._

_The family pets, who were joining the exodus, were roused from their room by the children and stacked within their cages next to the couch. Rinfi grew particularly suspicious here. Qiang explained that the vacation may be long, hence the animals would be better off with them. The girl's eyebrows quirked, but she said nothing while she unplugged lamp cords and emptied water dishes. Kento took his iguana George, named for a cartoon depicting a captive rabbit and an overly-affectionate abominable snowman, and carried the lizard about on his shoulders for the afternoon light._

"_Well, I gave the staff tomorrow off," Chan Run later announced from across the dining room when he came in fumbling with his jacket and hat. He scowled at the capricious lizard (whom he had nicknamed the Green Bastard) still riding around with his son and continued, "The second I told big sister about it, we both knew we couldn't keep our workers from their families."_

"_Very good," Wenling nodded. "What did you tell them?"_

"_The cleaning crew for the kitchen's ventilation are unavailable during the night as they usually are. Closed for cleaning, simple as that!"_

_The couple smiled at each other, pleased that the employees would be one step closer to home. _

_Dinnertime was quiet. Chan Run took over cooking and sent his children into the garden to help their mother with the pottery, though he ate nothing, for he had a lunch at the restaurant; instead he sat and watched over his family with wistful glances between checking his packing list. Qiang had a little to eat, drawing out the meal in small bites. Wenling took her dinner quickly and helped herself to an early slice of the orange trayed up for dessert. The children, sensing the elders' grim lack of appetite, bent over their food with eyes down and chopsticks darting into mouths. When their father remarked on the hour, they obediently rose to go. The young warrior, on the other hand, merely trailed listlessly between the houses to light their way with hall lanterns._

"_You know, you could help us take our stuff to the car," Rinfi glared over a box of games for the late nights._

"_No, Kento." Chan Run held up a hand as he passed by his children. "He doesn't need to rush us off any faster."_

_His daughter considered that and glanced at her brother before slipping toward the front door where the family van awaited in the mouth of the alley, already half-full of suitcases. When she had gone, Chan Run looked solemnly at his son. The glow of paper painted strange red shadows across his smile lines and the scars on his hands. For a while he said nothing under the paling skies. The two into turned the oncoming night sowing itself over the eastern wall, each with his own dreams of tomorrow. Then the world slipped below the line of daylight and he came alive again. "The storm is gathering."_

"_Storm? Maybe we should wait to go," from the doorway came Rinfi's worrisome tone._

"_No," Chan Run did not turn his eyes from his son, "There is time yet."_

_Wenling came in with her suitcase and toiletries then. Her husband got up and took her belongings out to allow her a few extra moments with her boy, which were spent in pained silence. Kento looked for a sheen of tears on her cheek and found none. She was not weepy in her motherly way as he had expected; rather, she took on the iron will to dredge up a mask of strength for her war-fated son. Seeing right through it, he gathered her into the expanse of his arms, where he felt her nerves in a fit of shakes. For the first time in his life he could see the little cracks growing around her eyes. "Mom, don't. I'll be fine. I mean, you and Grandfather have been preparing me for… how long now?"_

"_You started your stances when you were four," Wenling answered mechanically._

"_Ten years. And Grandfather has been telling me the story even farther back than that, as far back as I can remember. If there's anyone who's ready for this, it's me. We're gonna go bring this thing down and we'll be home," a snap of the fingers, "like that."_

_The shuddering stopped. "Boy, haven't I taught you anything?"_

_Energy exploded within the circle of his arms, sending him backward into the grass. He took the brunt of the ground with his shoulder, directed it into a roll through the massive cage of ribs, and pushed himself upright onto the balls of his feet. He found his own angry blue eyes staring back at him. "That sort of arrogance will be your downfall!"_

_Kento rolled his own eyes away from the glower, brushing them off with a grin. "C'mon, Mom. I'm a part of the legend, right? That means I can't fail. Hardrock will take care of me."_

"_I can't have total faith in a shell."_

"_You need to have faith in _me_." He took her hands between his, "I'll come back, I promise. I promised Dad, I'm promising you. No worries, okay?"_

_Her temper withdrew into the mask with the heat of his hands. She nodded one slight bow of her chin toward the earth, enough to appease him. "You are a great warrior, Kento, but never assume you are the greatest. If they knock you down from that foolish dream, the fall will kill you."_

_Without offering a hand up, she strode by with her feet darting out below the hem of her dress. "And you should've seen that coming. I certainly hope you are as prepared as you think you are."_

_At the gate she ducked her face behind the iron screen and let herself come undone. A thick sob drove at the wells of his heart._

"_Children going off to do battle!" he heard her choke out to her father. "Have we not been thankful enough for our fortune and serenity? What is a few more years to the cosmos?"_

"_To ask for time is asking too much," came the gruff answer._

_In the street, Kento's finger fluttered on the glass tank wedged between a tent bag and the sheeted birdcage in the backseat of his grandfather's dated Isuzu. "Remember, get them out first thing and set up a place for them. I don't want anybody dying of stress, especially not George."_

"_First thing, big brother," Mei Ryu assured him._

_Qiang slid the van's door closed before climbing into his own car._

"_Be careful on the road, Father. We'll be right after you," Wenling bowed a lament-reddened face to him. He nodded, though he was gazing solemnly at Kento. The younger stared back, mirroring the intense apprehension of the old man's eyes._

_Qiang had been working the fields with his father and younger brother in the foothills of the Purple Mountain when soldiers invaded Nanjing on a campaign of the second Sino-Japanese war. They were taken prisoner and their land burned, but they were lucky souls. His mother, little sister, and youngest brother, who were gone on a market trip to the city proper, were never seen again. Qiang knew great pains borne of war. He tried with everything he had to hide these pains from his grandson and, knowing his eyes were giving himself away, he bowed his head deeply to the boy._

_The gears gripped and he glided away from the curb without so much as a wave back. At the stop sign, the mirror flashed wide blue eyes wrinkled up in a smile before the car rounded left and out of sight._

_Chan Run shut the van's hatch and climbed into the driver seat. Yun was settling in with a sketch pad to try his hand at drawing. Mei Ryu, so naïve and eager for the road, waved an enthusiastic goodbye to Kento. Rinfi looked on at her brother with what was undoubtedly suspicion and possibly worry. He followed his mother around the side, where she climbed in the frontand shut the door. Chun Fa kicked in her car seat and looked at her favorite brother longingly, wondering why he was standing on the other side of the glass. "Bye, Tangerine."_

_(((Riding in Kento's arms through the market, the toddler fussed and squirmed and squealed with fat little fingers reaching out for a neat stack of orange spheres. _

_Kento stopped in his tracks and looked. "Tangerines?"_

_He plucked one from the pile to pay for it and had the fruit seized by the chubby hands. Chun Fa gummed the waxy rind, protested when her brother took it. He snickered. "Relax you little tangerine thief, I'm just peeling it for ya.")))_

_His father looked at him one last time before shifting and turning to back out while Kento walked alongside the van down to the street. The boys grinned; his sisters and the adults could only see the boy they were leaving behind. _

"_Bye," he faked a smile with his wave._

"_Bye, big brother," his siblings chorused back._

"_Goodbye," he bowed to his parents, chin inclined. Chan Run dipped his head._

"_Goodbye," Wenling pressed her fingertips against the window._

"_We'll see you tomorrow," Chan Run slipped a pair of sunglasses into his hair for the clear skies and beamed at his son with force. "Until then, don't forget to call."_

_The vehicle shrank and shrank under a sky gone green. The turn signal flickered in the gloom and for just a moment he thought the light would snap off prematurely, and the van would circle and lean until they all came back to him. But then it turned and they were gone._

_The empty street made him grow restless with the magnet, so he went out to meditate near the shrine. There he found a peony that someone had placed in the Buddha's hands. When he had settled himself on the ground, the buzz ebbed away into a low current and let him revel in a stretch of nothing._


	3. Last Looks

Author's Notes: Originally this and the previous chapter were one, as I wanted to paint an entire day to encompass Kento's world. But it was long as hell so now there are two.

**Chapter Three: Last Looks**

_Time stopped for a while, or rather, it didn't matter to him. He opened his eyes and stretched the weight of his muscles against gravity, peeled his socks off with his toes and, despite his grandfather's words, practiced his forms until a shift of shadows began to gather in the corners of the hallways and under plant leaves. _

_Finding himself without any present duties, he sauntered off to turn up the television's volume while he made a snack. The evening report told nothing new of the questionable green clouds that had dissipated into the sun's warmth. The main focus was the sudden madness raining on the world. The top story came in from Istanbul, where an apartment building manager had been stuffing children into the building's incinerator chute for nearly three days before being caught. Road rage was reaching homicidal levels in the United States. Prison riots gripped half of the Soviet Union._

_Kento, sick with the news, broke himself of the screen's grip to start a cooking when movement caught his eye from the rear house. A boy was scaling the wall, of average build and ash-black coloring. It was Kanno Hama, his oldest friend. The two held no concrete memories of their first meeting in kindergarten; their minds reached as far back as mudpies and monkey bar fights. Like the burly Chinese boy, his voice was rough and loud and crude. Perhaps they had always taken to each other due to the way they found amusement in the simplest of things._

_He was the prime example of mixed elements. Named for the beaches, Hama held a little earth and no water in his nature. More, he was given to the air, particularly in the way words flowed out with nearly each breath. Though quiet, Rowen could keep up with the lad as well as Kento, ever-ready with his own energies. And, like most other people, Hama had a secondary element in is veins: fire._

_(((_"_As far as I'm concerned," he glared at the sparks that jumped from his near-dead lighter until they caught on the dried leaves extended from his fist, "there are only two types of people in this world. Creators and destroyers. Which are you?"_

_Kento reeled back and obliterated the wood paneling of the building they stood next to. Inside, the barber gouged his client's hair at the noise and threw down his scissors to chase them away. "You bastard kids!"_

_They ran on, Kento laughing with splinters of wood buried between his knuckles.)))_

_He got up and wandered into the back yard as the boy sprang from tree branch to roof to ground. Doors, Kento had learned, had never been Hama's thing. He preferred windows, trees, and any other inconvenient methods of entry to something as simple as a proper entrance._

"_Hey dude, what's up?"_

"_What's happenin, cap'n?" Hama brushed the dirt from his hands where he'd steadied himself with the fall. He straightened and looked around. "Awful quiet around here. Where is everyone?"_

"_Gone to my great-uncle's out in Ueda. I'm joining them tomorrow."_

"_Aha. So that means you're free for the night."_

"_Sure am."_

"_And you're just sitting around the house?"_

"_Well, I _was_ about to make something to eat…" his eyes drifted toward the kitchen._

_Hama snorted. "Cooking for one is a pain in the ass. C'mon, let's get outta here. We'll find something."_

"_Right. Let me turn off the TV and grab my keys and money."_

_He blew out the lanterns after gathering everything and locked the house while Hama scurried at the pillars, trying to find his own way up and out. When he found himself trapped he waited outside the gate. Together the boys started off toward the train station._

_Along the way they crossed the street when they happened past a shattered display window and the store owner giving his report to the police. As they stepped up onto the opposite curb and spotted a payphone, they took it upon themselves to call Rowen, who, like Kento, was doing nothing more than awaiting a signal. It was Rowen who had first led them from the familiar neighborhood paths into the islands of darkness between the street lamps to breathe in the life permeating the air, up and down the streets of the city beyond what they had known before. The one called Strata, whose left arm was banded with pink scars from whips of string in the error of years past, said little tonight when he met them on the platform._

"_Strange things are afoot," Hama reported with a salute as the three closed the gap to the train._

"_Tell me about it," the blue forelock falling into his face kept his troubled stare from either of his friends. "The police have been to my building twice today. Domestic calls."_

_A bell announced the closing doors. The other two settled into their seats as the car pitched forward, while Kento chose to inspect the route line map no matter how well he knew it. There he turned his head this way and that to hear the personal reports of bad atmosphere hanging over the city._

"_I found a brown hair on his jacket. Look at me, Yuki! When have I ever been a brunette? He's always been so crazy for me-"_

"_-after trying to embezzle millions of yen. He was an idiot and got caught right away, of course. He didn't have the knowledge and, honestly, nobody ever would've pegged him for it until lately-"_

"_-and nobody's heard from her since the day before yesterday. The cops are thinking the boyfriend-"_

"_-even animal control is up to their neck in calls. Dogs are getting spooked and trying to bite when-"_

"_-got hauled in. He completely freaked out and mauled the dealership owner-"_

"_-picked up for beating her kids. She was always such a good mother-"_

_Kento took his seat next to Hama, feeling the oncoming quake, and waited with eyes forward on a newspaper gripped between two gnarled wrists._

_**Sudden Influx of Crime**__, the headline read. __**Police have been overwhelmed by a number of bizarre incidents. Seemingly in answer to the string of unseasonable weather patterns, people across the world have descended into violence. Tokyo police are particularly concerned with an outbreak of sexual crimes, including 16 arrests for frottage yesterday alone.**_

"_Hey Rowen, what's frottage?"_

_Just as Rowen, being the walking dictionary he was, opened his mouth to answer, electric pain racked Kento's body and the train groaned to a stop. In the darkness around the train, streaks of gray filtered in from light deflecting off the rocks falling from the tunnel ceiling. All of a sudden the steel of the roof sounded very thin underneath the pelts of concrete. From another car came a child's scream. A few seats down, a man stood up with a gold cross held out from its chain about his neck._

"_The dark times are upon us! Even the earth feels it!" He cried out in English. And then he fell with his family into a circle of prayer._

"_Look at that fool," one businessman remarked to another. "A thousand yen says he's never been through an earthquake before."_

_The two laughs whipped the dead air._

"_Are you okay?" Rowen asked from where he was knelt on the floor. Kento groaned, feeling another one._

"_I told you strange things are going on! I told you!" Hama cried out over the rumble as he braced himself against the seat._

_The delay didn't last much longer than a few minutes, but everyone buzzed like wires there in the darkness, even the silent ones. The fluorescent flickered back on just as the engine whirred back into life and sent Hama sliding out of the plastic seat and right to the floor._

_Not far from the subway entrance they found a restaurant, where the Ronin ate sullenly. Their companion's attention was consumed with listening to the bickering tables around them and snickering into his napkin. "Are you guys listening to this? She got it on with his best friend while he was out of town because she found lipstick on his underwear! In their daughter's bed, even! That last part's kinda sick, though… I mean, if _my_ parents-"_

_Suddenly there came a terrific crash of plates. Kento turned to see the chef climbing onto the counter in the midst of a verbal barrage against one of the waiters._

"_I'm sick of this! Cutting up little dead things for these gluttons to inhale!" he was screaming. The waiter deftly took the filet knife from within the manic chef's reach. "They're always wanting more, and so are you! More food! Faster, faster! I didn't prepare it right! Those fool Westerners don't like their fish cold! Nothing is ever good enough around here! I quit! And what's more, I hope each and every one of you chokes on your dinner!"_

_With one piercing shriek he sent his shoe through the rice and showered everyone with grains, the boys included. The other employees, who had been timidly watching the whole affair, sprang to tear the chef down from his chopping block._

_Hama gestured wildly at the man gnawing on the host's arm, "You see? Even here! What the hell is everyone's problem today?"_

_Rowen's eyes stared at Kento over the rim of his rice bowl as he scooped the last grains into his mouth._

_(((Seeing his parents' success, the archer became curious of the great things his past family had accomplished and soon found himself immersed in genealogy. Once the idea to enter the information into his computer told hold in his head, he set to writing an intricate program for the whole affair. Kento didn't see him outside school for a span and wrote it off for the computer fad._

_One day the younger boy announced over the lunch table that he was taking a weekend road trip with his mother. A bug forced him to reboot his computer and upon doing so, he found a new pinpoint over Ama-no-Hashidate that yielded no information. The lady Hashiba was familiar with the strip of sea-locked land winding under the bay skies and decided on a whim that her son must see it as well._

_Upon his return, Rowen said little of his trip. He became more interested in the Rei Faun's wushu practices, to the point of severity. Kento simply thought he had burned himself out on genealogy and was moving on to new things until the reason revealed itself nearly a year later._

_They were sparring in Kento's room, for the winter-ridden courtyard was too treacherous. Rowen had learned how to flow around the blunt force of each hit, but if one struck perfectly, he would become airborne. And that was exactly what happened._

_He crashed onto the desk and sent things clattering to the floor, among them the orange orb that Kento had a habit of carrying around._

"_What is that? What is that?" he scrambled up backward to perch on the chair._

_The future Hardrock hadn't thought this would elicit such a reaction from the younger boy. He held it out for him to see. "It's a marble."_

"_No it's not!" Rowen frantically groped for something inside his jacket pocket and pulled out an orb just the same as his, only blue with light shrouded inside a slow whirl of dark smoke. Kento took it from his hand and held it up to inspect. It didn't feel like stone the way his did. It didn't even feel like glass; it nearly felt like a bubble, or a thin plastic that gave and bent under his fingers. Through the blue haze gleamed the character for life. "Remember when my mom took my to Ama-no-Hashidate? We were making our way through the trees when, I swear to you, a huge blue armor flashed in front of us! I tried getting to it, but it just disappeared into thin air. There was just this up in an old bird's nest."_

_He took the blue orb from Kento, who slapped him on the back. "Well alright! You're a Ronin Warrior, man!"_

"_A what?"_

"_A Ronin Warrior. A long time ago there was a sacred war against a demon of the netherworld. When the war was over armors made from the elements were given to chosen families to protect. My family received Hardrock from the earth. Nobody knows where the armors went over the generations, only that they'll come back when they're needed. And guess what, buddy?" He held up Hardrock's orb between them. "If we've got this much of them that means we're the ones for the job."_

_Rowen, having been completely unaware of the legend until that day, was not as enthusiastic as his earthen friend. "I don't want any of this! Can't I pass this on to, I don't know, somebody who wants to save the world?"_

"_You're joking, right? It's in your blood just like it's in my blood, even if your family forgot altogether. We're spellbound to it."_

_The atmosphere tensed around Rowen as he went over the prospect of war in his head. "Kento, who am I?"_

_The question had never been to the forefront of his mind but the way Rowen's body sailed to deliver a hooked ankle or a heel aimed for the temple, the way his head tilted back toward the sky as the ground slipped away below his feet, his spacey disregard for time, all answered in a second. "Air."_

"_No, I mean, what is my armor?"_

_Kento recited to himself on his fingers, "Hardrock, Wildfire, Torrent, Halo, Strata! You must be Strata!"_

"_Strata..." for a moment he sounded at peace with the way the armor's name sighed on his lips. "__What now? Do we tell anyone about this?"_

"_No," he shook his head. As much as he wished to, his grandfather's words flowed out then. "If anyone knows who we are there's a greater chance that they'll get us when we don't expect it. It's not like anyone would believe us anyway.")))_

"_I don't know what's up," Kento shrugged. "But I've been feeling kinda funny too."_

"_Not like you wanna go rape and pillage the town, right?" Hama wielded his chopstick for protection._

"_No," Rowen said glumly from where he was resting his chin on his forearms._

"_Eh. Everyone's acting strange, that's all I'm saying." With that, Hama scarfed down the last three pieces of fish. "Are you guys done eating yet? There's a new game down at the arcade that's just begging for me to play."_

"_Yeah," Kento took out the last of his meal and got up to pay the tab, only to find that every guest's meal had been comped by the manager for the scene with the chef. Once the trio had fought their way through the crowd suddenly exiting the restaurant they found him still writhing as three white-uniformed orderlies struggled to wrap his limbs before throwing him into the wagon._

"_Let's go," for once nobody stared at the blue head drawing back into the crowd. "I feel sick for watching this."_

_Kento and Hama began to protest with eyes affixed to the lunatic, but managed to drag themselves away when they saw Rowen far down the street headed east into the artificial day of a neon Yokohama._

_A zig-zag of asphalt brought them to their favorite arcade. Lights rippled across ceilings and mirrors, beckoning them to drop rounds of metal for a joystick. Kento went up against the computer in a round of Street Fighter. Rowen chose jet racing. Hama picked a red plastic gun up from its holster, smiled, and began pumping coins into the machine._

_The trio had a respite from the dementia around them then. Any sinister energies that may have been forming within these walls were being channeled into triggers and buttons. They played and played, and if they ever stopped to question what it was about this place that gave them peace, any outside distractions sent them plunging right back into the digital violence._

_During a scene change Hama's face appeared in the tinted Plexiglas screen. "Hey, I'm broke and so's Rowen."_

"_Yeah, I'm just about there," Kento patted his pocket and heard a scarce rattle of money. He caught sight of Rowen leaning against the wall at the entrance with arms crossed and eyes down. A telltale sign of the weight of the boy's mind. "Ah, screw it. I haven't gotten very far on this one anyway."_

"_I haven't even played it yet," Hama, walking backward beside his friend, sized up the plastic box. When Kento said nothing he turned around to venture home._

_Though the massive psychosis had scaled down over the hours spent in the arcade, there was still something hanging over the streets, driving the night creatures into bottles. They watched the drunks pile in at each stop with wary eyes and even Hama grew quiet until they parted ways at Rowen's apartment._

"_I'm gonna be tired in the morning," Kento stretched and scratched underneath his arm. "Mom's having me go into the restaurant before I take off."_

"_Sucks, man. Have a good one out in Ueda and don't get killed trying to get out there. Fuckin' lunatics everywhere."_

"_I'll watch my back."_

"_You do that. Hit me up when you're back in town."_

"_Sure thing."_

"_Rowen, I might be showing up on your doorstep if you're around tomorrow."_

"_I should be," the archer lied right through his smile._

"_Cool. See ya guys later!" Hama waved over his shoulder and started for his house._

"_Looks like things have quieted down here," Rowen turned and surveyed the mostly-dark complex. "So what time are we gonna meet up tomorrow?"_

"_I dunno. Where are we going?"_

"_Your guess is as good as mine."_

"_How about I swing by here around eleven? We'll figure out what's going on then."_

"_Sure thing, buddy. If anything happens before then, I'll be heading over to your house."_

"_Right on."_

"_Okay, I'll see you tomorrow." Rowen opened the glass door and went in._

"_Yep, later!" Kento turned to run. What he was running from, he didn't know. Perhaps it was nothing more than time._

_Halfway home he slowed to a walk. As his wind-burnt lungs pulled for more air he caught glimpses between rooftops of a full white moon soaring over the heat lightning. It seemed quite a phenomenon to him this early in the year and so the flashes of white and purple and gray tore at him with a wonder for the omen in the shifting skies._

_After he had unclipped the large gate key from his belt loop he made straight for the living room, where he huddled in the light of the TV screen and half-paid attention to the show as he listened to the silence bearing down on a house that was completely empty for the first time in his life. The voices, the flurry of telephone bells, the clunks and bumps of intimate belongings all stored up and dragged about in the hallways… gone. _

_The deep, peaceful blank was cut short by a soft hiss and faint orange light on his eyelids. Cramped sleeping arrangements and alien noise disoriented him for a few seconds before he gathered himself. He opened his eyes to see snow emanating from the screen and on the end table by his feet, the strange orange orb pulsating unevenly, as though it responded to each shimmy and shake of the earth. The pictures on the wall, portraits dim within the gilt frames, rattled with another breath from the ground below. The light was certainly much brighter than before, nearly a steady glow. _

_It was then with his mind sharpened into reality that he felt the magnet, not flowing and buzzing through him as it should have, but pulling apart at random seams of muscle and clashing together at joints. There was no outright pain, just a muted current still distant with time. _

_The clock atop the television, barely visible in the low light, read 3:38. Despite the late hour, this particular channel should have been running old horror movies. Kento wished he could be confused by the situation, but he knew all too well what was happening. He got up and shuffled into the bathroom to relieve himself and wash the day's sweat and salt from his body before bed._

_He emerged from the tub after absentmindedly executing his hygienic routine of shampoo and soap twice, wrapped a towel around himself and headed into the kitchen for the leftovers his mother had left for him in the refrigerator, which had been cleaned out in preparation for the oncoming absence. He carefully dished himself up cold soup and put it into the microwave to be reheated. The Rei Fauns ate all excess food and thus Wenling saw the contraption as something of a waste, especially as she preferred to heat food on the stove. He fumbled with the buttons and when he had figured out the whole mess, he leaned against the counter and looked out into the courtyard as he had the night before, wishing his father's voice was there to keep him company in the darkness._

_After he had his fill of food and his hair had nearly dried, he plodded through the yard. He stopped there, his feet tingling, and looked up at the sky overhead to squint out the magnetic fields. Only starlight there and the silent lightning over the horizon, yet he kept on until the muscles around his eyes twitched with exhaustion. Knowing power of that magnitude was still beyond him, he went on up to bed, not bothering to look out the window at the dark house. There was one image that flashed across his mind: foamed spit flying from the chef's mouth as he railed against the straight jacket. Kento shut it out before any others could take hold and stretched out between the sheets. Presently he laid down and fell into sleep._


	4. War Dance

Author's Notes: Though I am going by the dub universe (it's what I grew up on with this series) I choose to use many of the locations from the sub. Hence the boys are in Tokyo when they first meet, not Toyama.

**Chapter Four: War Dance**

_For a while the world fell away and so did his dreams. Even his own being ceased to exist within the dark riddles of sleep until there was the great electric pain, surging through in great white waves. It overtook his nerves and sent him starting upright for a single breath._

_The absence of footfall over the verandah wood and food scents to fill the air pushed him from the bed as though the sheets were threaded with live wire. There was no moment of respite and he spurred on toward the young day._

_He pulled on pale jeans and a yellow shirt in the braids of navy and pink pouring in through the windows. A careful survey over the sandstone walls yielded nothing as he tied his favorite bandana across his brow. The morning was clear and promised to be bright, with all the storm clouds having vanished from over the verdant world in the night's middle hours. Any other day Kento might have said it was gorgeous. This day, though, the warm breeze blew away unnoticed, the bird sailed and sang beyond him as he executed his morning stretches with feet bared to the sparring grounds._

_Throughout the night the phone had not rang, and that worried him. Normally someone would have called to report a safe arrival. He punched in the numbers written in his grandfather's hand on an old paper scrap. The line rang six, seven times. Just as he pulled the receiver away to hang it up, a clicked answered._

"_Yes, Rei Faun residence."_

"_Grandfather?"_

_A beat passed. When the voice replied, it was more labored than Qiang's. "Nephew Kento."_

"_I'm sorry, uncle Jianyu. You sounded just like Grandfather!"_

"_A small error, my boy. Why are you up so early? It's barely light, even on the mountains."_

"_I just want to know that everyone's alright. Nobody called me."_

"_That's because they arrived late. No one is awake yet."_

_A deep gulp lurched up his throat and he let out a relieved sigh._

"_You sound like you're all nerves."_

_Kento hated how his body language betrayed him. "You can tell, huh?"_

"_Who wouldn't be? I've shaken sometimes just thinking about you. All I can do is ask that the earth-mother will hold under you wherever you go."_

_Everyone had words for him. He bowed his head humbly with no one to see. "…Thanks, uncle Jianyu."_

"_I'll tell everyone you called. I'm sure your father will be on the phone the moment he opens his eyes. Until then, stay sharp, my boy."_

_Kento said his farewells and hung up. His mind disengaged and hung above his body standing in the hall, suspended by a string. In this disconnected reverie he remained until a distant ambulance siren broke the drift. He made for the front door to retrieve his father's paper from the front steps and leave it bound on the dining room table._

_Breakfast proved to be a lengthy routine. He found himself suddenly appreciating Wenling's efforts as he struggled to keep time with the cooking. Once he had dished himself a heaping plate he nodded approvingly at the messy kitchen and took his meal to be consumed in front of the television set._

_It seemed that he couldn't get away from the news. Film rolled on and on with nearly every channel, wailing greed and murder. Kento grumbled at the screen until he found an educational station that was cycling out of the pure terror to run brand new footage sent in from a Hungarian explorer profiling an omen from the heart of Africa. He hunched over his plate to watch ritual fires reflected in the sheen of sweat rolling over black bodies stamping at the earth, twisting and writhing at the sky. The drummer burnt his feet on the fire stones for the road-blistered heels of warriors past as he drawled his song out over the beat. All around him the curving forms threw their hands to the gods with a mighty scream. It was a war dance._

_After the dancers faded to credits and every stray morsel of rice paper was gone, he was filled with a sluggishness that brought his eyelids down for a snooze with his head craned on the couch back. Not much time passed to his senses, for when he came out of it the sun was still below the eastern wall. In stretching, Kento knocked some of the decorations of the table with his foot. When his fingers closed around Chan Run's antique compass, the needle spun about frantically._

_Back in the kitchen he trudged through the cleanup routines, wishing for Rinfi's deft little hands that usually scrubbed the pots and for Mei Ryu's window of fury that shook the crumbs from the kitchen mat for the birds. He boiled water to sanitize the chopsticks and cooking utensils, wiped counters and washed the dishes with his toothbrush in his mouth all the while. After everything had been done he grabbed the extra breadsticks for the road, pulled the shade of the outer-facing window, and slid the door closed without looking back._

_He ate one with the hose gun aimed for the thirsty plants as he ran over locks and lights in his head. Above, the sky was veiled with green wisps pulling at the vaults of heaven. Kento found himself remembering the stories of radioactive black rain that fell on Hiroshima. He wondered if the sky's fight to hold its blue against the mists was the sign. Seemingly in answer, his feet tingled with a rumble echoing off the walls. He shuddered, shut off the hose, and went for his parents' room to scoop the car keys from a clay dish on his father's nightstand. In the living room he took one fleeting look at the lifeless rooms, the silent telephone, and grabbed the orange stone from between the oxen._

_His nerves were electrified the moment he set foot out the door for the industrial work van. A final lock on the front gate and around back to the garage, where he flung the door up with one hand. The beastly old thing had a grouchy engine that sputtered to life after he nearly flooded it, an interesting fact he wouldn't learn until three years later when his father took him out to teach the proper methods for operating a vehicle. After running back to shut the garage he paused with one foot in the floor of the van as he turned to look once more at the gold dragon gracing his doorway. _

_This was the very first experience the boy was to have with driving and he specifically left the house early to drive up and down the road. Steadily he picked up the basics until Enoki-san, the neighborhood's overly curious housewife, peeked out from behind the morning glories curtaining her porch at the van jerking with each touch of accelerator or brake. The onlooker cued him to pull into a driveway, make a shaky attempt at reverse, and take off toward town._

_The radio droned, "…stranger by the minute. Fresh in from Tokyo, we have a report of a teenage boy and a white tiger roaming the Shinjuku district. Police have no idea where he has come from or what he intends to establish by interrupting traffic, but they have enlisted a team of riot forces and large animal specialists armed with tranquilizers. Neither the boy nor the tiger have made any threatening movements as of yet…"_

_A teenage boy aimlessly wandering about Tokyo and causing a scene all the way? This was it. Kento hunched over the wheel and put the pedal down._

_Normally a simple trip, the route to Rowen's house was suddenly turned this way and that by one-way streets and, eventually, alleyways. He still managed to make good time and found the bearer of Strata not absorbed in something up in his apartment as usual, but sitting diligently on a concrete cube of dirt and flowers near the curb with his head turned down in the wind. He shoved off and was walking toward the van before Kento could even stop._

"_Hey," he said breathlessly as he slid into his seat. He, too, was wearing his trusty blue sweatband. His eyes didn't touch the sky._

"_Hey. Judging by the news, everything's centered in Tokyo at the moment."_

"_Tokyo it is."_

"_Which way is it to the highway?"_

"_Turn right here. A ways down they start to have signs for it. I'll keep a look out."_

"_Right." He was still unnerved by Rowen's reluctance for words. Grasping for any piece of co0nversation, he found the rude question falling right out of his mouth. "Where's your dad?"_

_From the corner of his eye Kento saw him flinch. "Working, of course. He was headed for the observatory, thank the heavens. Maybe he'll have some peace there. It's mom I'm worrying about. She's covering some diplomatic thing in the USSR. With all of this crazy shit going on, she's reveling in it."_

_The ride from there was uncomfortable to say the least. Rowen, plainly worried about his parents, sat grimacing at the floor with arms and ankles crossed. Though he served as navigator, he barely threw out a direction, just enough to not get lost. Kento, feeling no want to disturb his friend, tried to stare out the window vigilantly._

_The two had been into the capital city before, but always in the backseat of a car or school bus. In trips past he had served as navigator with his canny ability to maintain a general sense of location. Now, behind the wheel, he found himself second-guessing his instincts for proper streets. He looked all around him for just a moment to assess traffic and managed to look right into the eyes of a police officer driving the opposite direction. The recognition of an underage driver was unmistakable. He checked his mirrors to see the patrol car braking. "Oh good. A cop just saw us and now he's trying to turn around. Hang on."_

_He jerked the wheel and sent Rowen sliding around in the seat, hanging onto the seatbelt for dear life. A right, a left, down four blocks, another right. Kento felt this was sufficient for ditching an authority figure and blended into traffic._

_When Strata began fumbling with the seatbelt release and the air very nearly buzzed with electricity, Hardrock deemed this a worthy stop. Sure enough, as he struggled to parallel park the streets grew dark underneath a bank of ominous clouds, green and black like the day before. The engine of the van cut out in the midst of its idle, leaving the tank of a vehicle stuck half in the lane. Kento didn't even try to turn the ignition over. Instead, he got out and stood by his friend in the street, whose archery training had sharpened his vision to great distances and tuned his ears to discern location through acoustics. Rowen closed his eyes and let his head swivel, not failing to draw attention from more than a few passerby in the process. When he picked up some odd noise, his eyes snapped open and he darted through the crowd, looking back over his shoulder only once at Kento._

_Alarmed cries grew louder and louder as they raced down the streets. Vehicles moaned out their death with each honk of the horn, each angry voice bellowing at other bodies hanging out of the dead metal. he stopped dead in his tracks on a corner as though he was suddenly very lost and nearly caused Kento to barrel into him. The clouds blotted out the sunny sky now._

_Tremors stung Kento's feet. Just as Rowen began to move, his hand shot out and grabbed his arm. "Wait, dude."_

_Rowen stared at him in confusion. He ignored it and simply felt out the rumbling concrete. "Something's going on. We gotta get out of the street."_

_The archer looked around at canopies and rooftops. He jerked his chin at a fire escape. "Let's go."_

_Kento jumped to grab the sliding ladder and rode it into the rebound before making his way up. Rowen wasted no time in waiting; he had already jumped and pulled himself up over the railing. The rumble had evolved into a cacophony of feet and mouths. A mob of terrified citizens stampeded below, sending waves of human energy through the rock and metal._

_Rowen flew up the stairs, leaving Kento behind to climb the dirty steel. The hard vibration was gone so suddenly Kento had ascended half a flight before the thought even registered. His hand reached out to steady himself on the railing and cool steel no longer touched his flesh. When he looked down, his clothing had given way to some sort of tough orange and white plating that covered him from neck down.. He could not describe it, for it was something he'd never encountered before: neither traditional armor, nor metal, nor stone._

"_Rowen!" he called, barely able to hear himself over the screams. "Rowen!"_

_His comrade sprang up the last flight with the slightest flex of the legs and landed on the roof. His eyes, twisting around and around above the lines of steel in Kento's vision as he pounded up the jungle of rail, looked down from the blue and white plating close against his slender frame to his comrade, then back to his own body with the same shock that the earthen boy knew must've played across his own face._

_Having seen Rowen's potential, Kento let his weight sink toward the steps, which suddenly seemed very thin, before propelling himself up with all the energy in his legs. A metallic screech tore at his ears with diagonal force working through the frame. The bricking crumbled as the bolts ripped away. The fire escape tottered over the alleyway for one long moment before crashing into the building next door. Kento hardly noticed. He was flying._

_Across the valley of glass and steel he saw two others floating up here in the air, arcing, falling. A slight boy with long auburn hair was nearer him, an obvious comrade with plating white and a shade of blue paler than Strata's. His eyes were kind and seemingly out of place here among himself and the air-warrior. He stood at a distance, his pale Western face mirroring their curiosity._

_The other, the farther, did not radiate such warmth. His eyes, one covered by a sweep of flittering blonde hair, were a clear gray-blue turned mournfully toward lost sun as he soared. He did not revel in flight, just as his features did not thaw even when he recognized the garb that marked them as Ronin. Who could he be, all clad in green?_

_The four of them stared at one another across the rooftops, each waiting for another to make a move._

"_Looks like they're friends, huh?"_

"_They've gotta be." Rowen edged closer to him all the same. "They look just like us."_

_Hardrock cast his hand at the green and blonde. "Yeah, they may look like us, but that one doesn't seem too friendly."_

_The blonde caught Kento's point and turned his glare on him. Kento could almost feel the eyes pierce him and, with a cocky smile, shook off the unease that the look brought._

"_So what now?"_

"_I dunno. Should we go over and make nice with them?"_

_Just as Kento opened his mouth to answer, the abrupt silence set in around them. All four seemed to realize it, for their attention was longer on each other but on the empty grids of street. Thousands of people, there only moments before, had vanished from the glass-strewn concrete into nothing._

_A tiger's roar echoed up to them and Kento suddenly had no interest in making new friends. "Where's that coming from, Ro?"_

"_That way!" Strata pointed forward and slightly left. He bounded off, skirting right between the other two Ronin. The blonde's posture dropped into a defense pose until the air warrior blew right past him. Then he turned and followed without question._

_Trailing at a distance behind the blonde, Kento found himself keeping pace alongside the redhead. The kind look had gone from his eyes; now there was only dread as he closed the building gaps._

_Rowen stopped at the very edge of the roof with toes pointing out into the threshold of space. The others stayed back on the tarpaper. Only Kento dared to climb up alongside him and look down._

_There was another like them down there, only a red speck from where he stood up here. The red circled another speck, black, and darted in to engage it. Alongside was a beast of white and black snaking around the two. The three danced, swinging in close and falling back with clashes of metal to narrate every move. A single clang and the red soared down the street into a support pillar. The crash reached his ears with the crumbling of stone._

"_Looks like he's already in over his head," he remarked. The black moved in, thrashing at the red in the depths of shadow. The red wasn't moving now._

"_Let's go!" Rowen flung himself impulsively into the air. Kento would follow him anywhere, or so he had thought. Standing here, watching his friend plummet, he was torn between the want to honor the unspoken promise and the need for self-preservation._

_There was no resounding crash as he expected, nor splashes of red that he could not shut his eyes against. Instead a blue speck, Rowen, stood between the others. Kento heard his voice reaching not only for the black demon but for the others forgotten but still present behind him._

"_You _were_ gonna introduce us to your friend, weren't you? I'm Rowen of the armor Strata. This is my friend. Head's up!"_

_There was no time left here between the worlds of serenity and combat. Fate was beckoning to him, drawing his mind down with glory through terra firma. Kento closed his eyes and leapt earthward._


End file.
